A woman is most pleased when she has thoroughly pleased her man. Congratulations to those girls who are willing to go the extra mile a learn to give a satisfactory blow job.

I'm just saying...

Why does this post have to end with a slam suggesting that men, in general, are bad in bed? That's sexist and dumb, and if anyone made a similar comment about women anywhere, this would be the first place to attack it. Please stop adding this kind of childish crap at the end of every post.

Perpetuating the myth that the only thing that counts as "oral sex" is when the person pleasured is a man. Why not note that the classes specifically are geared toward oral sex performed on men? Instead, you show your heterosexist viewpoint.

As a lesbian, I can tell you I have a broader (no pun intended) definition of "oral sex". And I'll bet I'm not the only one who does.

Yes, there was a slightly bitter tang to this particular Broadsheet post. This doesn't excuse the baiting by the subsequent commentators (remember, guys, you've got to be able to tolerate the little lady's fits of the passions with a good humour - after all, their emotions rule them and confound their little brains, right?) so bad marks all round.

That being said, you don't necessarily have to cast this in a female subservience, pleasing-the-man light. Truly loving partners look for mutual satisfaction, and the sex doesn't have to be abysmal to want it to get even better. My S.O. and I have great sex, but we're still looking to enhance it and both she and I to our great surprise (and secret shame) found maybe 12 tips useful in a (god help us all) Cosmo article containing '101 ways to spice up your sex life'. Useful sexual information is everywhere, and you don't have to be a fainting waif to want to get hold of it.

Or if the sex is nonmutually pleasurable, skill at fellatio can lead to skill at cunnilingus - presenting a new, exciting sexual capacity and then subtly witholding it later can be a great incentive to a guy to self-improvement and exploration.

And yes, I just came down in favor of women witholding sex if they're not getting anything out of it. Feel free to burn an effigy of me at the next Guy Rules meeting.

It's just that great sex can be so goddamned easy if you actually want it and work at it. If you just want to roll on top, have done and roll off, fuck that noise. You don't deserve to get laid.

“We're no longer talking about wholesome pole-dancing or aerobic striptease classes but more along the lines of seminars in oral sex.”

Sometimes you ladies at Salon are such a bunch of prudes. Me, or any man or woman, going down on a man is as wholesome as apple pie.

Check out the workshops the good folks at Toys in Babeland (www.babeland.com) have been offering for years. They're open to everyone and there's a good mix of genders in attendance for most. and yes, oral sex for both genders is covered, and often.

For pointing out what the guys shouldn't have to, and will be pilloried for suggesting.

To say that polishing up on fellatio is "Women... seeking more to please than to be pleased" seems to take a rather narrow view of what's going on here.

C. Paglia has some interesting thouhts on bower dominance that I think are applicable.

Perhaps it's different because I'm a gay man. However, while I may be the one on my knees (sometimes) when I take a close look at his face it doesn't take a genius to see that he really isn't the one in control ....

Blowjobs can certainly be done in a dominating fashion if you go about it the right way ...

YEs, there are classes for the guys to learn the art of the tongue; I saw one feature on HBO.

No big anti-women crisis.

As a woman, I'd like to see more real stories; stuff I can't get elsewhere rather than fabricated issues making a cucumber out of a cigar just because the word "woman" appears somewhere in the story.

I have found the clit.It was south,north,east and west of Tikrit...

John Roach gave us this nugget of wisdom:

A woman is most pleased when she has thoroughly pleased her man.

*laughs heartily*

Oh John, John... as my female friends would say, "Spoken like someone who has no clit." I think, since women can have multiple orgasms, their pleasure comes from a lot more than just pleasing their men.

(and by the way - do you also subscribe to the debunked Freudian idea that all women are basically masochists? Ugh.)

Now if only they would come up with a course for men called, "The clitoris: where it is, how to locate it, and what to do with it once you find it."

Ladies, I've noticed a couple complaints (in this article and the comments) about men's ability to find the clit. Maybe your SO is a dud, or -- if you don't think he's a total loss in the bedroom -- maybe *you* should offer him some helpful advice, perhaps even a nudge in the right direction. Perhaps I'm behind on my reading, but I thought that women being EMPOWERED enough to explain to a man what she wants, and to demonstrate it, had been thoroughly handled before I was out of kindergarten (the late seventies).

If you're fighting gender stereotypes, don't close off with a cheap joke to reinforce them. I don't think that's what your readership is here for. Otherwise an interesting post.

Does no one at Broadsheet have HBO? Do those so blessed not watch Real Sex? Classes like this have been covered there at least since the turn of the century. They aren't new by any measure - the only "news" here may be in the fact that they're happening east of San Francisco.

Rather than bemoaning the fact that the cited website didn't see fit to cover classes on cunnilingus or mutual pleasure (they're out there, and have been for years) this could have been a perfect opporunity to reflect on that fact that, between abstinece-only sex education and our culture of shame relating to bodies in general and sex in particular, we're unnecessarily creating the conditions for exactly these kinds of classes to be popular. That some people are seeking to learn new skills for a fairly crucial area of nearly any relationship and are turning to whatever venues are open, lacking any sort of societally approved official channels. That we're so busy telling young people not to have sex that there's really no one worried about teaching people how to enjoy it once the plutocrats deem them acceptably ready.

Instead it was breathless pose that turned into a cheap shot stereotype about how men don't give a rat's about their partner's pleasure.

Well done, Sarah. For an encore, why don't you write as story about teens using porn as sex ed, bemoaning the mysoginist overtones of most porn, and totally overlooking the fact that they lack basically any alternatives?